La fábula de las tres ciencias. Antropología, Etnología e Historia en el Brasil

Abstract

This article gives a broad panorama of the origins of Human Sciences —or a part of them— in Brazil, and the role they played within the Brazilian nation-building process. It is suggested that each one of them —History, Anthropology and Ethnology— was delimited having regard to one of the great ethnical sectors of the country and to the role attributed to it in that process. Mainly, Ethnology captured Indians in a primitivist paradigm while excluding them from History; this latter was reserved to the White protagonists; while Anthropology focused on a black, marginsegregated population. The article also analyzes the value assigned to alterity in Brazilian Anthropology as a result of further developments in the above said scheme. Attention is also paid to the way in which the interpretation or translation of «the other» became a key element in a discipline which in its inception was meant to be instrumental for the configuration of a unitary social body.